While the game I've been bleating on about gets a theme, development has been hampered for the simple reason I'm an absolute novice at Flixel. (The more complicated reason involves job search.)

So I'm practising with a simple platform game that currently looks suspiciously similar to jmbt02's Achievement Unlocked.

I guess part of the problem is that I find the overall finished look of the game to be entangled with being able to develop the machinery. As I need to learn Flixel, a simple throwaway platformer should be safe enough for making mistakes on.

Two months ago I came up with a game design which required a theme. After all this time of wrestling with how the mechanic would work, and what graphics set would be used, I've decided that all this time I've been barking up the wrong tree.

So "Bob" Goes to Dobbstown will be a semi-puzzle tile-pushing game like the LID I made way back in the 1990s. The stage will still be 640x480px, but I'm currently looking at doing up the graphics a bit which may involve changing the tile size to something more visible. When I wrote the original LID in C++ with the SDL library the game was played fullscreen. Not too big on modern displays though.

Once I've got a basic LID, I can start throwing extras into the mix - maybe enemies that ruin your carefully planned groupings, or static ones that you need to make groups with the tiles beneath them to get rid of, and of course powerups. Everyone likes powerups.

The idea (well, actually the game mechanic) is pretty much worked out; now I need two things. I need to figure out the latest version of Flixel, so I know how to program it; also I need some pointers on a theme and usable tilesets that can be converted to said theme.

Ages ago I created a LID for a tile-swapping game that was going to be a mixture of Tetris and sliding-block styles, in C++ with SDL. It never went anywhere, but for a player character and tile theme I ended up using some glyphs from the BOBCO fonts - including a Dobbshead on the player body.

So it appears my puzzle platformer will be tentatively titled "Bob" Goes to Dobbstown.

Or something like that.

Oh -- and I need to locate an alternative platform tileset as a potential alternative to Ari Feldman's old things from 1996.

...that's the only reason I can think of for all the high-scoring excrement in the portal today!

I don't mind *Clock animations, but the troll group "Barney Bunch" seem to have outdone themselves with vast lorryloads of badly animated and offensive rubbish involving -- well, Barney, the most hated television dinosaur, and Drew Pickles, a character from Rugrats. I've no idea why these morons (assuming there's more than one brat and his legion of alts) have a penile fixation on those two, but it's probably something to do with immaturity.

Remember folks: If you'd blam it, don't submit it.

Fame is when people look up to you, think you're cool, and want to be your friend.

Notoriety is when people look down on you, think you're a fool or worse, and want to be your executioner.

One, please note, is better for you than the other.

I will automatically vote zero on any submission with the following defects:
1. Clearly incomplete
2. Clearly suffering from delusions of grandeur after being able to make one stick figure ram a sword/axe/bicycle pump into another
3. Involves anyone with an offensive username
4. Author comments are non sequiturs and/or deliberately offensive
5. Author comments are along the lines of "Vote 5 or I KEEL you!!!!11factorial"
6. Involve the spammy scoundrels yclept Duck Division
7. I inexplicably run the Flash in a popup window, lose control of the mouse, and click the zero button by mistake.

OK, as you were, not as you should be, damnit.